sigmund freud, from An Outline
of Psychoanalysis
There is no need to characterize what we call conscious: it is the same as the conscious
ness of philosophers and of everyday opinion. Everything else that is mental is in our view
unconscious. We are soon led to make an important division in this unconscious. Some
processes become conscious easily; they may then cease to be conscious, but can be
come conscious once more without any trouble: as people say they can be reproduced
or remembered. This reminds us that consciousness is in general a very highly fugitive
condition. What is conscious is conscious only for a moment. . . . Everything unconscious
that can easily exchange the unconscious condition for the conscious one, is therefor bet
ter described as “capable of entering consciousness,” or as preconscious. Experience has
taught us that there are hardly any mental processes, even of the most complicated kind,
which cannot on occasion remain preconscious, although as a rule they press forward, as
we say, into consciousness. There are other mental processes or mental material, which
have no such easy access to consciousness, but which must be inferred, discovered, and
translated into conscious form in the manner that has been described. It is for such mate
rial that we reserve the name of the unconscious proper. Thus we have attributed three
qualities to mental processes: they are either conscious, preconscious, or unconscious.
The division between the three classes is neither absolute nor permanent. What is pre
conscious becomes conscious, as we have seen, without any activity on our part; what is
unconscious can, as a result of our efforts, be made conscious, though in the process we
may have an impression that we are overcoming what are often very strong resistances . . . .
A lowering of resistances of this sort, with a consequent pressing forward of unconscious
material, takes place regularly in the state of sleep and thus brings about a necessary pre
condition for the formation of dreams
